Pop music savant Gavin Edwards has a book out, which is good news for everyone who ever wondered how Iggy Pop got his name, why CDs are released on Tuesdays, what Elvis Presley's sexual predilections were, and how many U.S. states Bruce Springsteen has mentioned in his songs.

Edwards' book "Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton's Little John: Music's Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed" (Three Rivers Press, $13.95) tackles the above and many more musical questions, myths and mysteries.

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Gavin Edwards shares gobs of tidbits on musicians and the stories they inspire.
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KEITH SRAKOCIC/STF (ENLARGE)
How did Hank Williams Jr. (top) get his nickname, Bocephus? And is the ice cubes story from the final days of country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons (below) true or false?
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To see if he really knew his stuff, we posed him some stumpers of our own, via e-mail, on a recent Friday. By Monday morning, the following answers were waiting in our in-box:

Q: How did the British punk tradition of "gobbing" start?

A: It isn't recorded who hawked that first mouthful of saliva, although a good guess would be Johnny Rotten, who was known to spit on Sex Pistols albums when fans asked him to autograph them. Soon enough, fans were returning the favor when the band was onstage, spitting (or "gobbing") on the Pistols as an anti-social sign of appreciation.

The spontaneous gesture became codified in December 1976, on a package tour of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned, according to film director Julien Temple: "There was this pent-up volume of gob, because everybody had read about spitting at punk groups. It was volleys of gob hitting, and they were leaning into it: John looked fantastic with all this snot and gob over his hair."

You will not be surprised to learn that not all musicians appreciated being spat upon. Bob Quine, who was then playing guitar with Richard Hell, remembered a British tour as just being plain disgusting: "In the beginning of the set, at least they'd have beer to spit on you. But then they'd run out of beer and they'd just hawk up whatever they could. Meanwhile, I'm singing background vocals, and spit's flying in my mouth. Every night I'd go back to my hotel room and rinse my clothes out, wipe my guitar off, and hope my clothes would be dry the next morning."

Q: Why is Hank Williams Jr. known as Bocephus?

A: It was a nickname given to him by his father, country music giant Hank Williams Sr. Since Dad drank himself to death before Junior turned 4, the name Bocephus is one of only a few threads of memory that remained for the son.

Q: Who coined the term "emo"?

A: Nobody knows for sure, but in all likelihood, it was a music fan in Washington, D.C., circa 1985, where the emo scene started with bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace (who would merge into Fugazi). "Emo," short for "emotional," tagged bands with a hard-core sound but whose lyrics addressed matters of the heart rather than society and politics. Now it's a term like "new wave" or "post rock" — no band described as "emo" wants to be called that.

Q: Was Ronnie Van Zant really killed by a flying "Betamax guillotine" as Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down?

A: The "Betamax guillotine" legend — that Van Zant was decapitated by the plane's VCR — is infamous enough that on the Drive-By Truckers' 2001 concept album, "Southern Rock Opera," the fictional band standing in for Lynyrd Skynyrd was named Betamax Guillotine. The legend's not too far from the truth.

"There was not another scratch on him, except a small bruise the size of a quarter at his temple," Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle has said. "Ronnie was killed on impact by a single blow to the head by what the doctors told me was probably a TV or something like that. We were rock and roll, nothing was tied down. All these televisions and guitar cases and camera cases all this stuff went forward, probably at a hundred miles an hour." So a VCR might have been the instrument of Van Zant's demise, but his head remained attached to his shoulders.

Q: Did a dying Gram Parsons' friends really try to revive him by sticking ice cubes where the sun doesn't shine?

A: Yes, they did. After finishing his album "Grievous Angel," the country-rock pioneer Parsons had gone on a vacation in Joshua Tree, Calif., with three friends, including his high school sweetheart, Margaret Fisher. Some of the people present for his final days have different versions of the timeline and details, but the ice cubes aren't under dispute.

"Gram was doing a lot of pills, but he really wasn't shooting dope," Fisher said. (He had also been drinking a lot of Jack Daniel's that day.) "Some girl had sold us some liquid morphine from Pendleton Marine Base. The thing I remember about it is the girl who delivered it had a 2-year-old toddler running around." Parsons took two shots of morphine and almost immediately looked unwell, Fisher said. "I took him back to the room, put him in the shower, and did the ice cubes." An ice cube suppository is an old street remedy for an overdose — and it worked for Parsons, at least temporarily. He revived and even walked around his hotel room. If he had gone to a hospital then, he might have lived, but his friends assumed that he was through the worst of it. When Parsons fell asleep later that evening, his breathing soon became labored, and he didn't respond to CPR. A few hours later, early in the morning of Sept. 19, 1973, he was dead, only 26 years old.